Introduction
Exactly a year ago, last June, I preached on chapters 12 to 15 of Genesis. A year is a long time, so I’d better take a few minutes to remind you of where we have been so far in the Genesis story.

Genesis 1 to 11 tells how God made humanity perfect and good. But in the Garden of Eden, tempted by the serpent, we rebelled against God and brought sin, evil, destruction and death upon ourselves and the perfect world God made. But did God give up on his creation? No! Immediately he gave a promise of salvation. One day there would come one born of a woman, to crush the head of the serpent. And God begins, even in the first chapters of Genesis, to prepare us for how that salvation will come about, by introducing the idea of sacrifice and atonement. The first sacrifice was done by the Lord himself, when he clothed the man and his wife in animal skins before sending them from the Garden. And we see the offspring of Adam and Eve also offering up sacrifices to God. But Genesis 4 to 11 shows the inevitable spread of sin and the worsening of the human condition. It culminates in the story of Babel, where proud humanity shows how profound their rebellion is against God, and where God laughs at this puny display of human might and with one flick of his finger scatters them to the four winds.

Then in Genesis 12 someone new bursts onto the stage of salvation history. A man called Abram.  God took this one man and gave him a promise, sealed in blood in chapter 15 by a solemn oath and covenant. It is a promise of land, of a great people, and of blessing for all the peoples of earth. God binds himself to Abram and his promised offspring. And he gives Abram the covenant formula that is the basis of all his dealings with his saved people. I will be your God and you will be my people.

And now we continue the story of the faith of Abraham in chapter 16.
“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, ‘‘The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.””

Like Abraham in the previous chapter, Sarai here goes through her own crisis of faith in which she stops waiting for God to keep his promise and takes things into her own hands. Abraham had resorted to a cultural practice we know from ancient documents was prevalent in his time and place, of adopting a servant as his heir. But God reassured Abram and confirmed the reality of the promises. Verse four of chapter 15 says: 
“Then the word of the LORD came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.””

What was Abram’s response? Verse six of chapter 15 is one of the most significant in the whole bible, for within it we see the heart of how God saves his people. The heart of the gospel of grace. It says: “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness”

The New Testament says that through Jesus we exercise the very same faith as Abraham with the very same result. If we have faith in Jesus, the promised Seed of Abraham, then we are Abraham’s children. There has never been any other way to get right with God than by his grace, that is, his sheer mercy, that we receive simply by trusting his promise, like Abraham did.
However, we find in this chapter that he has one of his not uncommon relapses into unfaith.

Now, incidentally, chapters 15 and 16 show the great antiquity and genuineness of the text. The story of Abraham was not made up many centuries after the events. The customs it describes are known from the time it records, and indeed even hundreds of years earlier than this time. They appear in the famous laws of Hammurabi, and in sources across the middle east, including Ur where Abram once lived. You may have thought of surrogacy as a modern invention, but it isn’t. Sure we may assist the process with modern technology that allows a mother’s egg to be implanted in another woman. But the idea of a woman having a child for another woman is as old as the hills, and ancient middle eastern peoples had laws governing surrogate motherhood of exactly this type.

So in suggesting this, Sarah was simply following a normal cultural practice. It was nothing out of the ordinary. But therein lies the problem. Because she knew, as well as Abraham, that God had promised something totally extra-ordinary! That Sarah would have a child in her old age, the child of the promise. But it was a decade since God reassured Abraham, and her words here show that her faith in God’s grace towards her has faltered. She says, “‘‘The LORD has kept me from having children.”

Now I think her problem is slightly different from Abram’s lapse in chapter 15. Abram lost faith in the reality of God’s ability to do the impossible. And so he re-interprets God’s Promise of a son, taking his servant as his adopted heir. Here we see Sarai taking her servant to be a surrogate mother to do the same thing. Both have lost faith, but where Abram loses sight of God’s sovereignty and power, Sarai loses sight of his grace and mercy to her. Because it is not so much God she doubts as herself. “The Lord has kept ME from having children.” Sounds like she’s saying to Abram, look, it’s all my fault – God promised a son through me, but my faith hasn’t been strong enough. I’m not good enough for God, I don’t deserve to bear the child of the promise. You’d better get someone else to do it for you.” And so she too falls back upon merely human means to try to fulfil God’s promise. There is a lesson for us in that isn’t there? Remember God’s promises are GOD’S promises. He doesn’t need us to make them come about. Sometimes like Abraham we will doubt that God really is the Almighty Creator who can do anything. Sometimes like Sarah we will look at our own unworthiness and weakness and lack of faith and think there is no way God can work through someone like me. But God is faithful, strong, and merciful more than we can know.

Well, we see what happened next in verse 2:
“Abram agreed to what Sarai said.  3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife.  4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.”

Did you see the news story this week about Percy and Florence Arrowsmith? This British couple hold the record for the longest marriage in modern history. They celebrated their 80th anniversary on June 1st! According to 100 year old Florence Arrowsmith the secret of staying together so long was “you must never be afraid to say "sorry".”
"You must never go to sleep bad friends," she said.
Percy, aged 105, interrupted to say that his secret to a happy marriage came down to those two important words that every wise husband learns to repeat often. And those two words are?
… "Yes, dear."

Well, four thousand years earlier Abram had obviously learned the same thing as Percy Arrowsmith! We see here that he says in effect, “yes, dear” to Sarai’s request. He just meekly goes along with his wife’s lack of faith in God’s grace and puts pleasing her above God’s promise. Sound familiar? Didn’t the first man, Adam, do something very similar? He went along with his wife instead of pointing her to God’s covenant promises. With disastrous results. Ever since then, women have complained about men’s leadership or lack of it. When they do lead they do it like tyrants. But most of the time they abnegate their responsibilities and leave it up to the woman. No wonder she feels she has to step in and make the decisions for the family. Surveys, even surveys of pastor’s wives, show that Christian women most often put lack of decisive leadership in the home as their number one complaint against their husbands.

Now while it’s true that Abram failed in his faith by listening to his wife when he shouldn’t have, let me quickly say that many of us men fail because we DON’T listen to our wives when we should. And there are just as many examples of that in the bible too. Christian men must not think that this passage (or Genesis three for that matter) teaches that women are weak willed and should be ignored. This passage is not meant to strengthen our chauvinistic prejudices, but to enlighten our hearts and minds, and thus, to grow in faith. Nevertheless, in this particular instance, Abram should not have just said “yes, dear.” Instead, he should have reminded Sarai of God’s faithfulness and grace and urged her to wait a little longer.

Now we talk today about the relationship problems that often result from the practice of surrogacy. How often do we read of a surrogate mother who falls out with the couple whose baby she is supposed to be bearing, and the result is a legal and moral and relational nightmare? As the reality of bearing a child that will not be her own sinks in, very often her attitude changes. That’s nothing new. Both the bible stories and modern experiences show us I think, that surrogacy is a very bad idea, fraught with all kinds of disastrous consequences. We read:

When she knew she was pregnant, [Hagar] began to despise her mistress.  5 Then Sarai said to Abram, ‘‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the LORD judge between you and me.” 
6 ‘‘Your servant is in your hands,” Abram said. ‘‘Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

Now a British sitcom writer couldn’t have done a better job than this, could they? They are the classic bickering old couple, aren’t they? At first you feel sorry for Abram having to bear the brunt of Sarai’s totally non-logical claim that it’s all his fault. As a mere male, it is hard for me to see how she can say it’s Abram’s fault when it was all her idea in the first place and he has just given her exactly what she wanted! I think we are intended to see the humorous side of this.

But in a way she’s right of course, and Abram shows just how right she is when he does exactly the same thing again! Sarai almost seems to be saying, “you shouldn’t have let me do this” – and she’s right, he shouldn’t have. Now maybe she’s right in another way too. Just where did they get this Hagar? This Egyptian servant? Think back to chapter 12. Why were they in Egypt? Because Abram didn’t trust God to provide for him in the land God promised to give him when there was a famine. And then when he went there he was afraid the Egyptians would kill him for his wife who was very beautiful, so he tells her “Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.” And he let Pharaoh take her into his palace, and in verse 16 of chapter 12 we read “He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants… and MAIDSERVANTS (and camels).” So maybe Sarai is not so unfair after all – Hagar was one of those Egyptian maidservants he acquired because of his duplicity and the appalling way he had treated Sarai in Egypt, putting his own fears before her welfare. If it hadn’t been for him, Hagar would still be in Egypt. But the fact remains, if it wasn’t Hagar it would have been some other servant, wouldn’t it? Sarai is still in the wrong, and so is Abram for passively going along with her bad idea.

But what does Abram do now? Well, he operates on the principle that two wrongs make a right. Yet again he abnegates his responsibility as family head and lobs the ball back into Sarai’s court. 6 ‘‘Your servant is in your hands,” Abram said. ‘‘Do with her whatever you think best.” And what does Sarai think best? Put this upstart of a slave in her place. I’ll show her who’s boss. “Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.”

Now all three of them, Abram, Sarai and Hagar are responsible for this debacle. “Hagar was not without her own share of guilt. She was not necessarily wrong in going to bed with Abram. She was a slave, subject to the will of her mistress. She had little or no voice in this decision. But she was wrong in the false sense of pride and smugness she felt toward Sarai.” [Bob Definbaugh]
This is a prime example of how complex sexual relations can be, and of how we can rarely say with certainty that just one person is to blame. They all contributed their own particular kind of sinfulness to the situation. Abram was persistently passive, Sarai was presumptuous, and Hagar was proud.

Anyway, Hagar does what you would expect her to do. She runs away and heads for home. She goes back to her own people. The road to Shur is in the south, on the way to Egypt. But running away does not change relationships or absolve you from responsibility. She was still Sarai’s servant, and still the mother of Abram’s unborn child.

These next verses show the extraordinary kindness and gentleness and grace of the Lord, in contrast to the selfishness and sinfulness of the other characters in the story. God appears to this Egyptian slave woman and she glimpses his glory and lives, a privilege that is given to very few, like those great ones of the faith - Abraham, Moses and Elijah. And along with the command to return and fulfil her duty, however onerous, to her mistress, comes a corresponding promise about the child to be born to her. Perhaps the most important thing to note here, and perhaps it was this that gave Hagar the strength to return, is that God has given her unborn child back to her as her own child, not Sarai’s child. For Sarai’s child is not to be born in the normal way. Sarai’s child is not Ishmael. He is the child of promise, Isaac, who will be born when God decides, not according to the will or whims of Abram, Sarai or Hagar. Look what God says to Hagar: “‘‘You are now with child 
and you will have a son. YOU shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard of your misery.”
The name Ishmael means “God hears,” and that is the theme of these verses. But it’s easy to miss the significance of God’s command to Hagar to name the child. You see, if it were Sarai’s child, as she had planned, Sarai would name him, not Hagar. God is giving her back her child. But he is also giving her back her duty and her humility. She is to go back and humble herself before her mistress. No sundered relationship has ever been repaired without the simple exercise of humility.

There are two names here, Ishmael, and Beer-Lahai-Roi. One means Gods hears and the other God sees. Literally Beer-Lahai-Roi means “the spring of the Living One who sees me” Hagar has now been given an even greater privilege than bearing Abram’s child. She has now seen and heard God. But where the lesser privilege led her to pride, the greater privilege of knowing God leads her to humble herself and return to Sarai.

And God has given her promises regarding her child. He will be, in accordance with the promise given to Abram, also the father of many nations. And from Ishmael the Arab peoples claim their descent from Abraham. And he will be “a wild donkey of a man,” always striving with his brother. Now what kind of promise is that? Well, it’s not like we think of donkeys – God is not saying he’s stupid, but rather than he will be free and unfettered and untamed. And that is a comfort to Hagar, because she knows that he will not be subjugated and enslaved to the son that God will give Sarai, but will roam free and wild.

A Tale of Two Women
Now there is a lot we may learn directly from this story about relationships and trust in God’s promises and God’s great grace and faithfulness. But the New Testament as we have seen takes up this story and the two women in it, and uses it not just literally, but figuratively, as an illustration of something else. It says that these two women represent two covenants. One is the covenant given at Mt Sinai and the other is the New Covenant in Jesus, who is the real child of Promise that Isaac was but a shadow of.

Now it’s important that we realize Paul is not taking about the faith of the two actual women, Hagar and Sarai. Hagar in this story shows that she can be just as faithless and just as faithful as Abram and Sarai. No, the illustration is about those who are the children of the slave woman and those who are the children of the free woman. Ishmael was not the product of faith, but of works, of trying to bring about God’s covenant promises by human wisdom and effort. He is like those who try to bring about their salvation by relying not on the promise of God, but on their own religious efforts in keeping God’s laws. Isaac on the other hand, is the product of Promise and faith. He is like those who are children of the New Covenant, who put their trust in God’s promises to us in Jesus Christ. Hagar was a slave, and she gave birth to the Arab races. That’s why she can be figuratively used for the Sinai covenant, because Mt Sinai is in Arabia. How ironic, that the descendants of Isaac, the Jewish nation under Moses, should be given the Law in the land of Ishmael. Furthermore, Hagar is a slave, whereas Sarai is free, and so Paul is saying that those who trust in the Law given at Sinai are slaves, but those that trust in the grace of God in Jesus are truly free.

The apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, who were being tempted to go back to Jewish legalism and asked “After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” That’s what the conception and birth of Ishmael represents. He is the son of a slave woman, and not the inheritor of the Promise to Abraham of eternal blessing. His birth is by natural means and is the product of unbelief. If you are trying by your human efforts in being good enough to reach God, then you are the child of a slave woman, and not the child of the free woman, not the child of God’s promise, and not exercising faith. Those who trust in works are born only in the natural way. But those who trust in the grace of the Lord Jesus alone, in the One who fulfils for us all the promises of God, you are a child born in the supernatural way, a child born again, born from above, born of the Spirit of God. Are you a child of the free woman? Or of the slave?
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